Kidrobot’s New York location will be hosting a special release event for the ‘American Depress’ figure designed by artist Ron English. In addition to the release of the limited edition figure, a mini print will also be available (seen below). The 12″ tall figure comes from Kidrobot’s Black line will retail for $400 and is limited to 200 pieces worldwide.

Eric Khoo's 'Tatsumi' will be released on DVD tomorrow (28th May 2012.) We'll defiantly be heading down to the shops to pick up a copy.

'Tatsumi' is a story based on the life and short stories of Yoshihiro Tatsumi, a mangaka known for his gekiga style of alternate Japanese manga. To a Manga or a comic book fan, the name Tatsumi conjures up adult themed comics like 'A Drifting Life' and 'Good-bye'. Tatsumi began his comic book career as a teenager, but it wasn't until the late 1950's that he coined the term gegika (dramatic pictures) which redefined the manga landscape. Gegika dealt with the grown-up, painful consequences of post war Japan and began to grapple with the darker aspects of life, this was the kind of comic definitely not aimed at children. 'Tatsumi' is set over five tales, starting with the horror of the second world war and taking in sexual desire, murder, familial tensions, betrayal and consuming passion.

'Shift' by moving image artist Max Hattler, is an attempt to visualise higher dimensions and unearthliness. Using the New Age idea of a 'dimensional shift' as inspiration, 'Shift' combines science fiction themes through abstract, stop motion animation of objects and colour.

Mark Hix’s East London restaurant, 'Tramshed', has installed quite the conversation piece with ‘Cock and Bull’ by Damien Hirst. As the restaurant’s menu centers largely around chicken and beef dishes, the title and subject matter of the work by Hirst is pretty spot on, as you can see from the image. A rooster sitting atop a cow preserved in formaldehyde, as part of Hirst’s ‘Natural History’ series can now be seen at 'Tramshed'.

In addition to that, and the reason why we've mentioned it here on the Animated Review, Hirst also created a painting entitled ‘Beef and Chicken’ depicting characters from ‘Cow and Chicken’ from the animated 1990s Cartoon Network series. You can just make out the painting in the background of the image, we'll update this post if we can find a close-up image.

UPDATE: Sorry the image is of poor quality but this is the best we can do for the time being...

Topsafe is a creative agency based in London... they publish books, produce films and act as agents for various artist. One of the artists they represent is Parisian graffiti writer Horfe. In the past 12 years Horfe has travelled the world extensively, leaving his own hugely unique take on graffiti wherever he goes

To sit alongside a new collection of work, including a print and a collection of t-shirt available through Topsafe's online store, Topsafe commissioned ILoveDust to create this short animated promo.

Argentinian illustrator Patricio Oliver recently teamed up with Geek Art to release 2 limited edition HE-MAN posters. 'The Heroic Warriors' and 'The Evil Warriors' both measure in at 60 x 40 cm and limited to only 100 a piece. These nostalgia inspired art works come with a signed certificate of authenticity. The only question is which should we buy?

2011 Bezalel graduate Daniella Koffler emailed the Animated Review to draw attention to her final year film 'Stairs To No End' which, after a healthy tour of festivals, is now up online.

'Stairs To No End' is a children's tale for adults, about the freedom to ask questions and the rejection of dogmatic thought. The film was inspired by Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book 'Infidel' and Richard Dawkins's book 'The God Delusion'. Daniella wanted to tell the story of many women she knows, who chose to stand alone, think for themselves and have paid a price for asking unwanted questions.

The film amalgamates an unusual blend of 3D cut-outs and "real eyes" projections. The real eye's giving an unnerving realism to the simplistically designed characters.

It's a really fantastic short with great style and a thought provoking message. We're really happy Daniella got in touch.

If you'd like to submit your short visit our contact page and send us a message. We'd love to hear from you too.

We posted Tom Hunter's brilliant 'Hotdog Hustle' short last December, which kind of reminded us of 'Regular Show'. Tom has just posted his equally inspired new short 'Cave Trouble' to Vimeo... this one kind of looks a bit like 'Adventure Time'! Tom must watch a lot of Cartoon Network.

Beth Algieri and Jonny Plummer (aka London animation duo Yum Yum) follow on from last Decembers post and the four animated commercials for 'Kwality' ice-cream with this short 3D comedy full of eccentric details and another wonderfully silly payoff.

On a side note Yum Yum have also release a series of vinyl collectable characters available for £60.00 plus shipping via their website. We especially love the hotdog man!

We posted Imbue's excellent print series of pornographic versions of Disney VHS tapes a few weeks back. A further Disney inspired has since gone up for sale via his website (now sold out.) The print, titled 'Hang In There', features a rather morbid image of Winnie the Pooh stood behind a noose.

We're rather partial to a bit of French hip-hop at the Animated Review, we love TTC and posted their animated MV for their track 'Pauvres Riches' last September.

We we're delighted when we stumbled upon this track by Odezenne because we discovered both wonderful music and beautifully crafted animation. Vladimir Mavounia-Kouka created the stunning bold black & white visual evocative of a 1930 Fleischer cartoon.

CalArts student Violet Bruce's film 'Womanhouse' is very minimal in terms of actual animation... it's almost more like an animatic. Regardless, we had to share this short with its followers because we loved the bizarre characters, surreal backgrounds and its, quite frankly, disturbing conclusion.

This student short was completed by David Martins da Silva during his spare time alongside his third year studies at EMCA (Ecole des Métiers du Cinéma d’Animation) the animation school located in Angoulême, France. Filmed on a mobile phone with integrated 2D animation, the short captures the perspective of a very imaginative child.

Announced last night after 'The Simpsons' season finale, and confirmed by David Silverman on Twitter, a 3D Simpsons short will precede the cinema release of 'Ice Age 4: Continental Drift'. The short will star Maggie Simpson in a story titled 'The Longest Daycare'.

CalArts graduate Brian Carter's final film (4th year) pokes fun at Disney Princesses. In the humorous 'Princess Of The Magical Tears' we see a princess restore a man to life with her tears, and this gift subsequently exploited.

Ödland's third studio album 'Sankta Lucia' takes the listener on a journey across Europe, from the shores of Greece to the forests of Lapland. Inspired by the richness of European folk music, the album speaks poetically about the continent’s history and close ties created between people of different countries with turbulent pasts. This papercraft stop-motion music video, for the track 'Østersøen', see the band's turbulent travel by boat and train symbolic of the albums message.

On the 18th of March the pilot episode of Disney’s 'Tron: Uprising' aired on the Disney Channel (it’s also available online for American viewers). The series, which starts proper June 7th on Disney XD, takes place between the original 'Tron' and the more recent 'Tron: Legacy'. It follows the quest of a young program named Beck, who under the mentorship of Tron, leads a revolution to wrest control of The Grid from the sinister clutches of Clu.

We love 'Tron', especially the "Jeff Bridges 80's Tron", and can't wait for this series to make its way to the UK. In the meantime we'll have to make do with the poor quality teaser posted below.

Czechoslovakian animator Alexandra Hetmerova has finally posted her short film 'Swimming Pool' online. The short was completed in 2010 and since then has visited numerous festivals collecting a plethora of awards along the way.

In February the Animated Review posted a selection of Animation Inspired skate decks. Amongst this selection was the Simpsons series one collection from Santa Cruz, series two has just been released and we had to share these too. The Marge and Maggie two board set with a deck for mum and a children’s sized deck for daughter is brilliant!

Following on nicely from Junaid Chundrigar's 'Avengers' tribute posted earlier this week comes this Pixar/Avengers cross over illustration from J.M. Walter, in which he re-imagines Pixar characters in the role of The Avengers. The image was posted to Cartoon Brew's Facebook page and has caused a lot of discussion on who's who, could you name all the Pixar characters and who they're meant to be?

One of our favourite childhood games, 'Top Trumps' was relaunched in the UK by Winning Moves back in 1999, they've recently had an overhaul of the brand which introduced more digital content and two new characters Toppy & Trumpy to strengthen the revamp. Martin Allais was commissioned by London Ad Agency The Corner to create this TV spot featuring the new characters in a funny, epic and kid friendly battle.

The arrival of a new DVD from the British Animation Awards is always cause for celebration at the Animated Review. They've just finished collating the 9th volume in their Best Of British series, featuring many of the films seen at this years Public Choice Award. The selection includes some of our favourites from 2010/2011... 'The Eagleman Stag' by Mikey Please, 'Matter Fisher' David Prosser, 'I'm Fine Thanks' by Eamonn O'Neill and 'Thursday' by Matthias Hoegg alone make this an essential edition to your DVD collection. Buy your copy here: BAA store

Junaid Chundrigar's premise for his 'Avengers' inspired short 'Disassembled' is "everyone has a bad day now and then, even superheroes."

After seeing the 'Avengers Assemble' trailer Junaid was compelled to create a series of illustrations which quickly developed into the animated short below. The 'Avengers', having broken several box office records already, it's well on it's way to netting close to $6 billion worldwide... Juiad's short is experiencing similar success having over 400 thousand views in less than a week!

André Damião is multimedia composer, based in São Paulo, Brazil. He created 'Em_bruto' as an audio-visual performance that was "born with the objective of exploring the interface of the software Pure Data (PD) as a medium of visual composition."

We've posted a couple of brilliant T-shirt designs over the last few weeks including Christopher Wright's 'Obelitin' Tee and the Barber Filth X Kid Acne's Spongebob collaboration. We thought it would be nice to compile this wish list of animation inspired t-shirts we'd love to own, trying to avoid the vast number of Mickey Mouse graphics churned out by every streetwear label on the plant.

'The Red Tide' is Jason Reicher’s 2nd year film from his studies at CalArts. The film noir short is full of brilliant production and character design. You can see some of the developmental sketches on Jason's blog. The suitably atmospheric music was provided by Max Rubell.

After many months of unconfirmed rumors, Guillermo Del Toro has made it official. He will be co-directing Henson’s upcoming stop-motion adaptation of 'Pinocchio', with Mark Gustafson. Shooting should start in 2013 on the stop motion version of 'Pinocchio'(based on the edition of Carlo Collodi’s classic tale illustrated by Gris Grimly.)

“In this new version of one of the world’s best-loved tales, Pinocchio embarks on a series of extraordinary and thrilling adventures, proving himself to be as indestructible as his love for his father, the studio said.

Del Toro and his frequent collaborator Matthew Robbins have been developing the screen story over the past year, and Robbins wrote the screenplay.

Veteran rock musician and film composer Nick Cave will serve as music consultant for the production.

“‘I believe that our tale of Pinocchio recaptures the darker, more daunting aspects of the book that have been missing from previous film incarnations and takes advantage of all the allegorical aspects of the tale," said Del Toro.

We posted the trailer for Yves Geleyn’s 'Colosse' last February. The beautifully crafted little story of a wood robot puppet and his bird friend is finally up in full online.

Yves Geleyn:

“I’m a huge fan of Jim Henson’s work. I have always wanted to work with puppets but never had the chance to do so before. I’m also a huge fan of robots; they were in all my childhood movies, cartoons, and comics. The robot from Paul Grimault’s The King And The Mockingbird; Brad Bird’s Iron Giant; and Goldorak, a Japanese cartoon, were inspirations for me. It was these two passions of puppetry and robots that drove me to create this short film, with a bird in it of course (can’t lose my bad habits).”

Illustrator Christopher Wright created this 'Obeltin' (Obelix and Tintin mash-up) illustration for a T-shirt collaboration with Bristol based Uno One Print & Design. At the time of this post there we're a couple still available via Chris' online store here: Didlife

Sharing a similar aesthetic to the previous two Ned Wenlock pieces to feature on the Animated Review, music videos for Danger Beach’s 'Apache' and MGMT’s 'All We Ever Wanted Was Everything', comes this advert for DDB South Africa and Honda.

In a similar vein to 'Fresh Guacamole' and 'Western Spaghetti' by PES, This music video for Delta Heavy track 'Get By' features a selection of toys and games brought to life through stop-motion. Directed and animated by UK based Ian Robertson.

Imbue, the London born artist, now lives and works in Brighton where his prolific street work lurks around every corner of the city. His relentless sticker campaign means that if you’ve been to Brighton, you’ll know the name Imbue.

Imbue has recently released a series of 3 new Disney inspired prints. The prints are titled: 'Digitally Remastered | Dumbo', 'Digitally Remastered | Pinocchio' and 'Digitally Remastered | Snow White'. Each image is captured from an original VHS that was customised with hand-cut collaged pornography. The original videos were on display and sold at Imbue's solo show 'Shotgun' at the No Walls Gallery in 2011.

The prints are signed and numbered in an edition of 100, if ordered as a full set all 3 prints will come with matching numbers. Available to purchase here: www.imbuesource.com/prints

Mikey Please’s utterly brilliant short film, 'The Eagleman Stag', finally makes its online debut after a very successful festival run. We would be remiss if we did not post it here. The Animated Review are huge fans of Mikey's work with 'The Eagleman Stag' pre-dating the TV on the Radio music video and Dragonframe commission, 'Seven Legs', both already featured on the Animated Review.

Also, rather excitingly, Please is currently working on and fundraising for his new film, 'Martyn Myller'. Even with just the samples of animatic seen in the video posted below we already know it’s going to be a masterpiece!

Inspired by the minimalistic LEGO 'Imagine' advertising campaign created by German agency Jung Von Matt (already featured on the Animated Review), Ilias Chalkiopoulos created this animated spot using the same minimal character design.

An aquatic Fantasia-esq stop-motion animation created by Brooklyn-based Hayley Morris for Hilary Hahn and Hauschka's song 'Bounce Bounce.' Also, check out the film of Hayley sketching and creating her tide pool creatures from fabric, yarn, papier-mâché and driftwood, directed by Danny Gregory and Tommy Kane (also posted below.)

Created by some of the most famous names in anime, Satoshi Kon ('Paprika', 'Perfect Blue'), Hiroyuki Kitakubo ('Blood The Last Vampire') and written by Kitsuhiro Otomo ('AKIRA'), 'Roujin Z' is finally being released on DVD in the UK on the 11th June.

Synopsis:

An elderly invalid is volunteered for a bizarre science experiment. He is given a robotic bed linked directly to his brainwaves, allowing instant gratification. This seems like a wonderful deal, until this seemingly harmless bed goes out of control and transforms into an unstoppable robot.

We posted Calarts student Sophie Diao's second year film ('Quiet') around this time last year. She's just posted what is presumably her third year project to her Vimeo page, so we've posted 'After Leaving A Forest' for your enjoyment below:

Jack Bonzom at Passion Pictures directed this powerful new public service announcement urging us to act now and bring President of Sudan Omar al-Bashir to the international criminal court to account for his crimes. For more information and to sign the petition visit: www.stopbechir.com

To coincide with the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Aardman have created a new animated short featuring Wallace and Gromit. The National Trust's 'Wallace And Gromit's Jubilee Bunt-a-Thon' will premiere at National Trust locations across the UK. The one-minute short was especially created for the National Trust Jubilee festivities as part of their Summer of Celebration campaign and shows the pair preparing for the big weekend by scaling ladders to hoist the bunting up around a magnificent manor house.

This is the third time in as many months Barber Filth has been mentioned on the Animated Review. This time for an A3 risograph Pink Panther print called 'X2' limited to just 15 copies. The print is available via his online store for a very reasonable £20.00

Also the Spongebob 'Art Fag Bob' collaboration with Kid Acne has been made available as a T-shirt via 2 Many Printers. Buy it here: 2 Many Printers

Shubunsha publish a huge variety of papercraft books and kits. Included in their range are a few books featuring cartoon icons including The Moonins, Snoopy and Astro Boy. These delightful craft books allows you to make charming paper versions of these characters.

Although the written instructions are in Japanese the visual guide means even those unfamiliar with the language should be able to complete these models.

We've posted images of some animation inspired titles Shubunsha produce below, a couple of which are available through the Animated Review online shop. Click on the shopping basket below:

"The lyrics stem from thoughts about the modern world we are living in. How data, television and the speed of technology is building up over landscapes, creating new metropolises. Knocking on all our doors, there is no escape. In the end perhaps only nature will be able to regulate against its enemies and the world that it's created.

The video reflects the lyrics and the sense of trying to save something, whether it is ourselves, a friend, a place of comfort, or the world we live in. The tension in the music is captured by the main character trying to save his world and let Nature Regulate."

We've posted some of Jake Fried's "moving painting" on the Animated Review before, he's just posted his latest work ('Waiting Room') to his Vimeo channel and as they keep getting better and better we had to share this too.

The process is laborious but effective. It's one drawing, slowly altered with a quick drying matt white-out and touches of pen and ink, consecutively scanned and played back at a high frame rate. Amazing!